This was the biggest hurdle to me making the switch - I didn’t have a support network, and while I’m tech savvy enough to research my own solutions, it was scary to potentially be out a computer while doing so. In reality, it was a non-issue. Answers are easy to find and even CLI solutions usually just amounted to copying a command from a forum post and pasting it into the terminal. Obviously not the best security to be running terminal commands you don’t understand but it was a good way to learn (for me).

Point being, if it’s someone who isn’t completely helpless, teaching them “Just type ‘debian’ + ‘problem’ into Google” will probably solve 90% of issues a non-power-user is going to have.

Give it a lick…

Actually, maybe don’t do that. Definitely do not.

Wow, that sounds awesome. Will definitely check that out - thanks!

You’re right, I did! In my defense, it’s been 20+ years since I’ve played it. Maybe I should change that.

Until the other issue highlighted in that comment - that the majority of people can’t afford to take the time off work to do something disruptive - is solved, I’m not sure how we get from here to there, unfortunately.

Just search for ‘no kings march 2026’ and you’ll get pages of results.

They’re saying that if 90% of all games that exist were new each year, the number of games that would have to release each year to achieve it would be exponentially increasing and therefore unsustainable. The facts are simple math.

This is a weird statement coming less than 24 hours after the largest protest in the history of the country.

Parents giving their children these devices, observing excessive attachment, and not cutting them off bear considerable responsibility.

While I do agree that parents should bear the brunt of the responsibility here, you must realize that kids are resourceful and no amount of parental oversight will stop a determined kid from accessing this content. Parents aren’t in their presence 24/7, and just like a kid whose parents deny them candy can find plenty of ways to obtain it without their parents knowing, the same is true for social media use. It’s the old adage that the more you tighten your grip, the more slips through your fingers.

liberty

You keep using that word, but this isn’t really about personal freedoms at all. It’s about companies that saw that their product was causing harm, and actively made the decision to continue promoting that harmful product in the name of profits. Their products were specifically engineered to cause these outcomes, and you’re defending their right to do that. Do you just propose we allow companies to do whatever they want in the name of profits, no matter the cost to society? If not, where do you draw the line? How much harm do they have to knowingly cause before you think it’s too much?

When risks are open & obvious, such as the overconsumption of certain foods & legal substances, that’s generally viewed as a matter of personal choice rather than unreasonably dangerous product defect.

We restrict alcohol and cigarette use by underage people, too, actually, because their effects are known to be harmful, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Nobody’s talking about making social media use illegal for adults.

Basically, I think you’re arguing against social media restrictions for kids which is fine but that’s a completely different discussion. It’s related, but it’s not what this article is about - this article is about holding corporations responsible for bad behavior. If that isn’t what you want to discuss, why are you here?

However, even supposing such features defectively make the system unreasonably dangerous in a reasonably foreseeable manner, that only demands that service providers provide fair warning. Once duty to warn has been met, users are reasonably aware of risks and responsibility shifts to risk-takers or parents who give children access despite reasonably knowing the risk.

Okay, I think you’re just not understanding the situation here. Meta did research on the effects of social media. They found that it was harmful. Even after determining that, they continued to promote it as not harmful. Zuckerberg even testified that that evidence that social media was harmful didn’t exist, after they had found evidence that it was. This all came to light because of whistleblower testimony. So even if we accept your premise here, that duty to inform was not met and that’s part of what’s at issue here.

Wow. I can’t even really conceptualize what that would taste like, nor do I want to find out.

Here I started typing up a comment asking what ‘Taco noodles’ were, then I looked more closely. What the fuck, I’ve never seen taco-flavored ramen before.

Addictive Personality is a proposed set of traits that makes sufferers more vulnerable to developing addictive behaviors, including things like gambling or social media. Does it help to frame it in a different light for you if you think of it as those companies exploiting vulnerable peoples’ disorders to extract money from them?

Telling those people to just have self control is like telling someone with depression to just stop being sad.

It’s like if someone had a forum where insurrectionists were discussing how to build bombs and where they were going to use them, and the owners had an internal meeting where they said, “Hey, we’re hosting some pretty awful people, should we maybe report them or shut this down?” and the answer was, “Nah, they’re paying users, and we want their money.”

Pretty sure Section 230 wouldn’t protect them, either.

The cost to move it when street cleaning or plowing or whatever is coming through would exceed the cost of a storage unit, I’d imagine.

I wouldn’t even care if they hadn’t used the Marathon IP for it. What the fuck was the point of bringing that back for this? It’s not like it has name recognition against anyone but like age 35+ folks who happened to play the originals in 1995, or the remakes on XBox Live Arcade, and those people are definitely not the market for a live-service extraction shooter, so what was the point here, other than to irritate people who would have enjoyed a proper reboot of the original trilogy?

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine Instagram, but every single post is a video of paint drying. Same infinite scroll. Same autoplay. Same algorithmic recommendations. Same notification systems. Is anyone addicted? Is anyone harmed? Is anyone suing?

Of course not. Because infinite scroll is not inherently harmful. Autoplay is not inherently harmful. Algorithmic recommendations are not inherently harmful. These features only matter because of the content they deliver. The “addictive design” does nothing without the underlying user-generated content that makes people want to keep scrolling.

This feels like an awful argument to make. It’s not the presence of those things that make Meta and co so shit, it’s the fact that they provably understood the risks and the effects that their design was having, knew that it was harming people, and continued to do it anyway. I don’t care if we’re talking about a little forum run by a Grandma and Grandpa talking about their jam recipes; if they know that they’re causing harm and don’t change their behavior, they should be liable.

Based on the responses in this thread, I feel like you could present this screenshot with a “I bet you couldn’t find your way out of this!” and a zip of the directory, and a significant number of users would voluntarily download it and extract it just to “prove that they could”.

The rest of the conversation, though, was about a (mostly) exclusively American thing, relating to lobbying and legislation against Wikipedia and IA. I’ve got no problem with shitting on the US for things we’re actually doing, but saying the public doesn’t support Wikipedia when we’re actually the #1 supporter worldwide of Wikipedia feels kind of disingenuous.

sane Americans largely take Wikipedia for granted

North America is Wikipedia’s largest funding source by a factor of more than 2. I’m not sure why you’re calling Americans out here.

Are you supposing that IA is better known in other countries than in the US? Are you basing that on anything?

I’m sold.